An extremist, not a fanatic

October 31, 2009

Everyoneseems to agree that the Home Secretary’s sacking of David Nutt as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs shows that policy is based upon prejudicerather than evidence, and that the function of experts is not so much to inform policy as to legitimate it by cloaking it with scienciness.This is true. But it misses something. In rejecting Nutt’s advice, Johnson is pandering to a large chunk of public opinion. Which raises the question: why is it that public opinion is more supportive of drug laws than the evidence would warrant? Here, I suspect, are the relevant cognitive biases:1. The fear of the unknown. Most of the supporters of criminalizing drugs have, I suspect, not actually taken them; I’m excluding newspaper editors and journalists here. And people are naturally scared of the unfamiliar - hence the Frankenstein complex and (a few years ago) the fear of GM foods.2. The status quo bias. People prefer existing evils to unfamiliar ones. For this reason, Nutt’s point that cannabis or ecstasy is less harmful than nicotine falls on deaf ears simply because, as Laban says, we’ve been smoking for 400 years but doing Es for barely 20.3. Representative heuristic and ignorance of unintendedconsequences. Having decided that drugs are evvviiilll, people think that a policy of cracking down on drugs is somehow associated with less use of drugs - they think outcomes must somehow resemble inputs. What they don’t appreciate so much are the adverse effects of such laws: the gang wars as dealers fight for the high profits caused by restrictions on supply; the diversion of police time; the higher crime as addicts must steal more to pay higher prices. Here, though, comes a problem. At least one recent opinion poll shows that these biases are not universal and that majority opinion - just - favours some legalization of drugs. Which raises a depressing possibility. It seems that when public opinion is wrong - for example on immigration - politicians pander to it, but when it is right they ignore it. The function of representatives in representative democracy, it seems, is take all the idiocies of public opinion, and when these are insufficient, to then add some of their own.

October 30, 2009

Insofar as I’ve given him any thought at all, I’ve long considered Slavoj Zizek to be a mere blusterer*. However, I fear Norm is too quick to dismiss this claim of his:

Although democracy, in the formal sense, is precious, it is not in itself a measure of ultimate truth or authenticity. We shouldn't fetishise democracy - after all, you can have democratic elections where the majority votes for a rightist populist, and when it does, you have the right to treat the government as illegitimate. I don't think that this formal electoral procedure should be taken as equalling legitimacy.

The thing is, the left should be ambivalent about democracy, at least in its current forms, for two reasons.First, in prioritizing stated preferences over justice, it gives too much weight to the interests of the noisy but wrongly discontented privileged and not enough weight to those of the silent poor who have resigned themselves to their fate.Secondly, cognitive biases research has shown that Marx was wholly correct on an important point. There are mechanisms which generate false beliefs, and these beliefs tend to support the existing order and hostility to the worst-off. Democratic outcomes, then, can often be unjust and inefficient, and antagonistic to leftist ideals.It’s a long leap from seeing this to Zizek’s Leninist vanguardism. But what are the alternatives? It’s rather condescending to claim that we can educate the public out of their cognitive biases - and impractical too, given the tendency for the trash media to strengthen them. Are there other feasible democratic institutions which might not be prone to the two problems I’ve mentioned? I don’t know.* Is this my Oxonian/empiricist bias showing? I’d welcome any evidence that I’m wrong here.

October 29, 2009

Could teachers’ racial stereotyping be a cause of black Caribbean boys’ under-achievement at school? That’s the question raised by a new paper by Simon Burgess and Ellen Greaves.They compared two measures of children’s ability at age 11: their results on Key Stage 2 tests - which are externally marked - and teachers’ assessments of their ability. In about three-quarters of cases, the two measures coincided, which is what you‘d expect. There were, though some cases where teachers’ assessments were higher than KS2 results, and some where they were lower. You’d expect this too, as there‘s a random element to exam results and teachers‘ opinions. But here’s the thing - there are systematic racial differences in these deviations.Take pupils who achieve level 4 - the expected level - in KS2 tests for English. Among white pupils, 12.4% got worse teachers’ assessments than their KS2 score, and 10.2% got better assessments. However, among black Caribbean pupils, 17.2% got worse teachers’ assessments and only 7.5% better. Among Pakistani pupils, 20.2% got worse assessments than KS2 scores, and only 6.2% better. For pupils entitled to free school meals, 19.1% were under-assessed by teachers and only 5.8% over-assessed.There were similar, though smaller, patterns for maths tests.The message here is depressing. Caribbean, Pakistani and poor kids are more likely than richer white ones to be regarded as poor students even if they are not. Some teachers, then, seem sometimes* to be seeing what they expect to see. Because they expect Caribbean or poor kids to do badly, this is what they see. Consistent with this, teachers tend to over-assess Indian pupils’ maths abilities. We shouldn’t, though, be too hard on them for doing this. As Dan Ariely has shown (pdf), seeing what we expect to see is a common trait. As he says:

When we believe beforehand that something will be good…it generally will be good - and when we think it will be bad, it will be bad (Predictably Irrational, p160-61)

Even so, the effects of this might be very nasty. Burgess and Greaves fear that if teachers believe pupils are worse than they really are then they might put in less effort, or pupils who feel under-valued might not try so hard. The result could be that these stereotypes might be self-fulfilling.There’s some experimental evidence that corroborates this, cited by Ariely. Psychologists at Harvard University got some Asian-American women to sit a maths test. Before the test, some were asked gender-related questions and some race-related questions. And they found that the women who answered the race questions performed better than those who answered the gender ones. This suggests that people can easily be influenced to live up or down to stereotypes. Women who were primed to think like women lived down to the stereotype (“girlies are bad at maths” ) whilst women promed to think of their race ( “Asians are good at sums”) lived up to it, even though the experimenters never mentioned these stereoypes explicitly. Now, if highly intelligent adults are subject to stereotype effects when presented just once with quite weak cues, isn’t it likely that children will also be subject to them, when confronted continuously with stronger reminders?Which raises a horrible possibility. Could it be that schools actually increase inequalities of educational achievement - between Caribbeans and whites or between rich and poor - through these stereotype effects? More generally speaking, could it be that the state - far from being a force for greater equality - is actually a force for inequality?* These qualifications are important. We’re talking marginal statistical tendencies here, not universal facts. ** For my money, Predictably Irrational is by far the best of books of that type.

October 28, 2009

Laurie’s post on white male resentment - the tendency for some white men to complain that they are under-privileged and marginalized when in fact they are not - raises an important question: what is the relationship between stated grievances and actual, genuine hardship?This paper by Daniel Neff sheds some fascinating light upon it by studying the relationship between subjective well-being and actual living standards in two Indian villages in Andra Pradesh. He shows that although the correlation between the two is generally positive, it is well short of unity. Almost a fifth of the poorest one-fifth of people - and these, remember, are the poorest in the world - say they are satisfied with their lives, whilst a third of the best-off fifth say they are dissatisfied.This suggests that subjective indicators - how people feel, what they say - are an imperfect measure of actual inequality.A big confounding factor here is people’s tendency to compare their present situation to the past and future. If people are less badly off now than before, or have high expectations for their children, they will report that they are satisfied with their lives even if, by objective standards, these are awful. Mr Neff gives the example of a woman working as a building labourer who says she’s satisfied with her life because she’s escaped an abusive husband and hopes her children will do well, and of a man who’s happy because he’s recovered from serious illness and is optimistic about paying off his debt. I suspect that this mechanism helps explain white male resentment. Some are unhappy about “feminazis”, the “gay rights lobby” or the “race relations industry” because they feel less privileged now than in the past - even though, objectively, they are still privileged.And this brings me to a big problem which Amartya Sen has often stressed - that paying heed to people‘s subjective, expressed, well-being can be very unjust:

The utility calculus can be deeply unfair to those who are persistently deprived: for example, the usual underdogs in stratified societies, perennially oppressed minorities in intolerant communities…routinely overworked sweatshop employees…The deprived people tend to come to terms with their deprivation because of the sheer necessity of survival, and they may, as a result, lack the courage to demand any radical change, and may even adjust their desires and expectations to what they unambitiously see as feasible (Development as Freedom, p62-63)

Unfortunately, our pseudo-democracy does just this. It gives too little weight to the quietly oppressed, and too much to the noisy but discontented privileged.

October 27, 2009

Two different comments on different subjects reveal a common error in thinking about social affairs. First, in response to my claim that much of the gender pay gap is due to women having children, Toto says: “you didn't consult any childless women before writing this, did you?” You’re damn right, I didn’t.
Second, a commenter on a post by DK says:

Try visiting an area that has experienced high levels of immigration and telling the teachers, doctors and police there that the sudden influx of a large number of non-English speakers is not an event that requires substantial additional resources.

Both commenters make the same mistake - they think we can trust the evidence of our own eyes. We can’t. Such evidence is subject to horrible distortions.The obvious one is small sample bias. What we see ourselves is only an infinitesimally small fraction of the 60 million people in our country. Drawing inferences from such teeny samples is fraught with problems, for example:1. Selection bias. The people we see are rarely a representative sample. For example, the childless women I know earn much more than the national average.
This can lead us into horrible errors. For example, journalists see colleagues and university friends earning good money and infer than average incomes across the country are high, which leads to the middle England error. 2. Overconfidence. People under-estimate error margins. So they fail to appreciate the huge sampling error of a small amount of evidence.3. Out-group homogeneity bias. We tend to believe that “others” are more alike than they really are. So, from seeing one or two immigrants act in a particular way, it’s easy to infer that many do.4. Confirmation bias. Having made the above errors, we compound them by subsequently over-weighting the significance of apparently corroborative evidence. These problems mean we cannot rely upon our own eyes. We need large-scale studies. And in these two cases, these happen to disconfirm the commenters. For example Bob Rowthorn estimates that the net fiscal cost of immigration to the UK is roughly zero. Yes, some immigrants require the tax-payer to stump up more money. But other immigrants provide these taxes. It’s a wash. And this paper (pdf) says that some 36% of the pay gap is due to women’s different life-time working patterns. This one (pdf) finds that 10 percentage points of the 25 percentage points gap between women and men’s pay after 10 years is due to differences in human capital accumulation. And National Statistics - which don’t adjust for other things - show (pdf) that the full-time gender pay gap is actually negative for single people, but increases sharply with the number of children. I think all this is consistent with my use of the word “much”: not “all”, or “most” - just “much”.Which brings me to a problem. Most people, I suspect, don’t base their beliefs about society upon rigorous social studies but rely instead upon their own eyes. Does this matter?The wisdom of crowds hypothesis says not. For everyone who sees an outlying woman earn more than a man, others see women earning less. Across everyone, the crowds get it right.Or do they? Let’s take immigration. Maybe, if you walk into a doctor’s surgery you will see lots of immigrants (not just the doctor himself!) and infer they are a drain on the tax-payer. In principle, this inference could be offset by people walking into factories or farms and seeing hardworking immigrants who pay tax. But this doesn’t happen. Many more people wander into surgeries than into factories. The availability heuristic therefore leads people to over-estimate the extent to which immigrants are a burden. Perhaps, therefore, the evidence of our own eyes can be systematically misleading, even when aggregated over everyone. Which in turn implies that the opinion of the majority might be wrong, even if it is not affected by the trash media.

October 26, 2009

In an earlier post, I asked whether the well-known marriage wage premium was due to causality or correlation. Some new Canadian research (pdf) sheds light upon this. It estimates that, among heterosexual men working over 30 hours a week, married ones earn almost 20% more than singletons; this controls for age and education among other thingsHowever, among gay men, the marriage premium - well, partnership premium - is just 4%. This poses a challenge for those who think the marriage premium is due to selection effects. After all, if it were the case that the same things that make a man attractive to an employer also make him marriageable, shouldn’t this effect be as powerful for gays as straights?*Instead, this might suggest that much of the marriage premium is causal. Maybe marrying a woman causes a man to earn more, perhaps because he expects to have to provide for children, or because he can focus more on his careers as his wife saves him time by doing housework. For gay men, marriage doesn’t have these boosts to earnings.Does this suggest that we should encourage marriage, because it raises productivity?No. The opposite is true for women. Married women earn almost 4% less than single ones - even controlling for having children. Maybe looking after hubby distracts a woman from her work. What’s more, whereas being gay is bad for a man’s earnings, it’s great for a woman’s. Lesbians earn more than straight women; this seems true in the UK as well as Canada. And whereas a woman loses money by marrying a man, she gains by shacking up with another woman; lesbians in couples earn 10% more than married women - again, controlling for having children. If we judge policies purely by their labour market impact, it makes as much sense to encourage women to become lesbians as it does to promote heterosexual marriage - though such a policy has other drawbacks. However, what stands out about this research is that bisexuals, men or women, earn much less than gays or straights: it‘s not clear why. All this raises a question. Why do we hear so much about the gender pay gap, when much of this is due simply to women having children, and much less about sexuality pay gaps (gay vs straight men, bis vs others) when these might arguably reflect deeper injustices?* Maybe not. It could be that what employers value is a conventional mindset, and married men have this whilst married gays don’t.

October 24, 2009

Of course they don’t. In politics - and especially on matters of freedom, there are powerful mechanisms selecting against reason:1. Reasonable people are not fanatics, so they don’t push their views hard, whilst stupid people do. For example, there are almost certainly more people in the UK who support free migration than there are members of the BNP. But how much publicity does the BNP get compared to supporters of freedom?Politics operates a form of the Dunning-Kruger effect - the same stupidity that causes people to have bad ideas causes them to exaggerate their importance, over-state their accuracy and to organize to promote them. And, as Adam says, decisions are made by those who turn up. 2. The media select bad ideas, as these provide scare stories. Take immigration again. “Migrants no problem” is not a story. “Migrant threat” is. So MigrationWatch gets free publicity, whilst advocates of free movement do not. 3. The benefits of freedom are often dispersed and unforeseeable, whilst the (alleged) benefits of restrictions are often more concentrated and salient. So opponents of freedom organize more, and are more vocal, than supporters. The 22,000 who complained about Jan Moir’s rubbish get publicity. What doesn’t get so much publicity is the opinion that, if the Daily Mail refused to run stories that were irrational, petty-minded and bigoted, it would print nothing but the racing results and crossword. 4. Politics is a forum for cheap talk, and anything that’s cheap is of low quality. It’s easy to want to restrict other people’s freedom when you don’t have to pay to do so.

October 23, 2009

It’s becoming increasingly clear that people’s behaviour is shaped by peer effects; for good or ill, we imitate those around us. A new paper sheds more light on this.The authors took the common room of the economics department at Queensland University of Technology. Some days, they left it tidy and other days they messed it up. They found that, when the room was tidy only 18 per cent of users dropped litter in it. But when it was untidy, 59% did so.People’s tendency to drop litter, then, seems strongly influenced by peer effects: if it looks as if other people drop litter, most people also do so, but if it looks as if others don’t litter, most people don’t. Anti-social behaviour is infectious. This corroborates the broken windows theory.The striking thing about this paper is that it shows that this is true not just of impressionable youngsters, but of intelligent, educated adults. Indeed, over-50s seem more prone to peer effects than others.I suspect the implications of this are more important than generally realized. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so harsh upon people from rough areas - where there are lots of broken windows - for behaving anti-socially, because they are more the products of their environment than generally thought. Doesn’t peer pressure research require us to reconsider our views about the nature and scope of individuals’ responsibility?

October 22, 2009

Several people seem to have missed the point about my last post. The point of comparing BNP membership to Cage and Aviary Birds’ circulation was to show that the BNP is a minuscule presence in society. Insofar as it has political presence, this is only because (party?) politics is itself a small social presence, so the BNP is a middling-size fish in a small pond. For example, there are 48.1m over-16s in Great Britain. Only one in 271 of these is a member of the Labour party, and only one in 166 a member of the Tory party. In many areas of the country you would have to throw a lot of bricks before you hit a member of a major political party, though the effort might be worth it.And I suspect most of us devote very little thought to politics. Even I spend more time thinking about music, food, gardening, or football than I do about politics - and I’m supposed to be one of the country’s top political bloggers.Party politics, then, is very much a minority pursuit - a point which those living in London especially are prone to overlook. There are good reasons, or justifications, for this:1. Party politics is dull. The typical MP spends much more time thinking about housing than about fundamental questions such as the nature of justice or proper functions of the state. It’s for this reason that Madeleine Bunting can write about political philosophy as if it’s a newly-discovered discipline. Even party leaders think much more like marketing managers - what will sell? - than about genuine policy issues; this is why there’s a huge gulf between what politicians say about education and what academics say.2. The belief that party politics matters just because it purports to deal with important subjects is wrong. In truth, politicians - at least within the feasible range - make less difference than they pretend: this is true for GDP growth, the composition and level of government spending, or life expectancy, among other things. As a check on this hypothesis, just ask: how much difference have particular politicians made to your life? For many of us, for most politicians, the answer is: very little. I can’t think of how, say, John Major or Tony Blair fundamentally affected me. Even if politics impinged very gravely upon you - for example, because you lost a relative in Iraq or Afghanistan - it doesn’t follow that party politics matters, as both main parties supported these wars. And even where politicians do make a difference, it’s often in unexpected ways. For example, Thatcher altered my life by deregulating the City in 1986, thus creating the conditions which gave me work. But I don’t think this was at all an issue in the 1983 election. 3. It’s rational not to pay attention to politics. All it does is make us angry, as DK and Laurie show so well. It’s surely better for our psychological health to just ignore politicians’ stupidity, corruption and bullying. 4. To be a politician is to be a fanatic - what sort of person would rather go to political meetings than watch Corrie? - and an egomaniac: you need to believe that you can “make a difference” and that others should share your views. These are deeply unattractive traits. Fanatics are far worse than extremists. You might object here these are the words of someone privileged enough to be able to afford to ignore politics. In one sense, you’d be both right. I am lucky not to be a Zimbabwean, Afghan or North Korean. In troubled nations, politics does matter. But in another sense, you’d be wrong. The fact is that under any foreseeable UK government the poorest people on the planet will continue to starve to death unnecessarily, whilst the poorest in Britain will be stigmatized and harassed. And this is, perhaps, the biggest reason of all why we should regard party politics with contempt.

October 21, 2009

Can we put the BNP into context? According to the Guardian, it has 11,811 members. This is less than the circulation of Cage & Aviary Birds magazine, and less than Huddersfield Town’s average attendance this season. It’s barely half the membership of the Bakers, Food & Allied Workers’ Union, and only one-seventh the number of adults who are boy scout leaders. Looking at the numbers, the BNP is a mere spot on the hairy arse of the body politic. So why does it get so much attention? The BBC’s justification for putting Nick Griffin onto Question Time is that it should devote airtime to parties in part on the basis of their electoral support, and the BNP got 6.2% of the vote in the last European elections.This, though, is obvious nonsense. Almost two-thirds of voters abstained in those elections, and even in the 2005 general election, almost two-fifths didn’t vote. The biggest electoral force is the “none of the above” party. And yet the BBC ignores this. If it were serious about allocating airtime according to electoral support, then every edition of Question Time would have two panellists who were antipathetic (or apathetic) to all the parties. But it doesn’t. Of course, NOTA opinion is hugely diverse - but the BBC pretty much neglects every strand of it. So, let’s be clear. It’s not getting Griffin onto Question Time because the BNP are a significant force. It’s doing so for the same reason that the skirts on Strictly Come Dancing are getting shorter - as an attempt to prop up the ratings for an ailing show.